Resolution 2010: Never pay an ATM fee again

This week, let’s take a look at some of the most common consumer resolutions and find ways to keep them. Today’s resolution: ATM fees.

This is a super-easy one to keep: Simply vow not to hit any ATM that will charge you money to withdraw cash from your bank account. There are a number of ways to do this:

— Make going to the bank part of a weekly routine, pull out a set amount of cash for the week, and stick to spending only that amount, even if by the end of the week, you’re paying for your dry-cleaning in nickels. This method is good for: the routine-oriented, people who can resist the impulse to burn through their cash once it’s in their pocket, people who take a secret delight in producing correct change when they do have to pay for lunch using whatever spare change had migrated to the bottom of their bag.

— Have the tools on hand to find your bank’s ATM wherever you are. MasterCard’s ATM Hunter iPhone app will tell you where any nearby ATM is, so you can use that to hunt for your bank. There’s also a Bank & ATM Finder (free), a $0.99 “Find An ATM” utility and the $0.99 “ATMs“. Download one of these applications and at least you can do due diligence on all your options before blowing $5 in bank fees at a strange ATM. This method is good for: peripatetic wanderers, people who don’t have the space in their brain to remember where their bank’s ATMs are within a 30-mile radius.

— Go cashless. A reader wrote in after “Change, change, change” to say that he’d solved his spare-change problem by eliminating it. He makes all his necessary purchases with a rewards-based credit card and rarely bothers with anything else. He added that this method had nearly eliminated any impulse purchases; nobody wants to be the one whipping out a Visa card to cover a $3.50 coffee. This cash-free method is good for: people who know that once they have cash, they’ll spend it; people who don’t worry about things like the western seaboard losing its power in a massive blackout for a few days.

Any one of these methods will help keep more of your money in your pocket; it all depends on which one works with your personality quirks. How do you avoid incurring ATM fees? Share at dollarsandsense@sfgate.com.